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SAN DIEGO - A third US soldier accused in the kidnapping and murder of an Iraqi civilian in Hamdania has reached a plea deal to reduced charges, his lawyer has said.
Lance Corporal Tyler Jackson, a Marine based at Camp Pendleton, California, will enter his plea next week but his lawyer Thomas Watt would not specify the reduced charges nor say whether the agreement includes testifying against the remaining five defendants.
Military prosecutors allege that the seven Marines and a Navy medic shot to death Hashim Ibrahim Awad, 52, in Hamdania in April and put his body near a shovel and a rifle in a bid to make it look as if he was an insurgent.
Another Marine and a Navy medic already have pleaded guilty to reduced charges and have testified during a court martial against others in the group. They have yet to be sentenced.
Awad's murder in the middle of the night in Hamdania was one in a series of incidents in which the conduct of American troops in Iraq further damaged the image of the United States in a war that has been widely criticised around the world.
Other Camp Pendleton-based Marines are under investigation in a separate incident in November 2005 in which 24 civilians were killed in the Iraqi town of Haditha.
- REUTERS
